With just about a month to go until the rollout of BlackBerry 10, RIM is reaching out to customers and the public about how great it will be, hoping, no doubt, that customers will hold off buying an iPhone or Android phone or Windows Phone. BlackBerry 10 could be the great, ironic BYOD product of 2013.

The amplifier for the data transmission on a mobile phone's antenna is the device's biggest power guzzler, wasting up to 65 percent of its juice through heat. Large increases in battery life may be coming soon through new technology designed to use power for data transmission more efficiently.

The FCC will establish a regular process and rules for approval of Internet services (basically Wi-Fi) aboard aircraft. The agency says that current approval system is ad-hoc and requires too much time.

FedRAMP, which aims to make it easier and more cost-effective for government agencies to adopt cloud services, is now officially open for business with the authorization of Autonomic Resources ARC-P service.

The Nokia Lumia 810 is an excellent, if not top-of-the-line Windows Phone available on T-Mobile. It's reasonably priced, has a top-notch camera and intriguing software, including two music apps that stream free tunes, "augmented reality" to show you what points of interest are right in front of you, and Nokia's highly-regarded maps. It also has a screen that's clearly a class or two below the best ones on the market, such as the iPhone 5. If you want a better screen on a Windows Phone, choose th

Phone prices are being aggressively lowered by Apple's competition and Apple appears to be responding with price cuts, something we haven't seen before. Never mind that excellent Android and Windows Phones can be had for a lot less than the iPhone's $199 with a 2 year plan; more and more users are opting for older and cheaper iPhone models. The bottom line of all this is that Apple's average selling price for an iPhone is going down.

The Great Firewall of China is increasingly effective in stopping anonymous VPN-based access in and out of the country after a recent upgrade, and now the government is considering another attempt to strengthen authentication of users before obtaining Internet connections. The proposed law is being cynically framed as a privacy protection measure. As offended as I am at the ideas behind these proposals, I'm confident that they can't be implemented practically.

Why did the founder of Mobile CRM company DoubleDutch give his employees Android Nexus 7 Tablets for XMas? He wanted to inspire them to develop for the platform  not just for the iPad  and explained how enterprise app development is fundamentally changing the way enterprise business is done.

Google and Motorola are trying to make the hottest phone on the market and running into the problems that kept everyone else from making such a phone, such as poor battery life. The way they're going about it suggests that Google does not have the clearest vision of what they want to do or how to do it.

A new research report shows Apple with a majority of the smartphone market in the United States, but lagging behind Samsung and other Android vendors abroad. In spite of U.S. dominance, Apple is allowing discounts to its newest iPhone. The same research shows Nokia's fortunes turning in Great Britain, although less so among younger buyers.

There are many more malware-infected Android devices out there than you might think. It's all because the Android ecosystem and Google Play store are more friendly to malware and exploits than iOS and the Apple App Store or Windows 8, Windows Phone and the Windows Store. There's some, but not much reason, to think things will improve for Android in the near future.

A serious vulnerability in the Android kernel for their Exynos processors in many of their phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S3, has been found by the Android hacking community. It may be used by any application to root (jailbreak) or unroot the device, brick it or even silently modify arbitrary memory or other applications.

Apple Needs To Cut The Patent Nonsense. If Apple really thinks they need to sue the competition out of the market then they must think they're in worse shape than anyone else thinks. Recent legal setbacks, including the reexamination by the US Patent and Trademark Office of the 'pinch and zoom' and other patents, have the potential to embarrass Apple severely and embolden the competition. Now's the time to scale back in their settlement negotiations.

An update to Windows Phone 8 should be out soon sporting messaging improvements, the ability to text replies to incoming callers, bandwidth-saving IE changes and favorite Wi-Fi connections, among other improvements not yet specified.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.